Horsey Set

The upscale temptations of “Luck” and “Downton Abbey.”

Dustin Hoffman, as an ex-con financier, and Dennis Farina, as his chauffeur, in David Milch’s new series, “Luck.”Credit Illustration by Philip Burke

Here are a few things I know little about: gambling, horses, the manly bonds of career drinkers, the lonely hotel rooms of businessmen, and the sly mathematical ecstasy of statistics. In other words, I’m almost certainly not the critic to determine the authenticity of “Luck,” the new HBO series by David Milch, who is himself a horse owner and has wagered at the track for nearly half a century.

Still, I can say that the show has a musky, appealing sensuality to it, a stink of leather and aged Scotch. Starting with the pilot, filmed at the Santa Anita racetrack and directed by Michael Mann, the show’s camera noses into everything, lapping up the dirty allure of the stables, the twitchy degenerates filling the bleachers, the champions gloating for the cameras, and particularly the races themselves, sequences in which the camera gets so close that it might as well be a horse itself. When it comes to story, unfortunately, “Luck” is a drag. Like David Simon’s “Treme,” “Luck” has lofty, loving aims: it yearns to celebrate an exotic subculture, one whose argot can feel as impenetrable as Klingon. At Milch’s Santa Anita, rich men wager on poorer, younger bodies (those of both the horses and the jockeys)—a theme so fascinating that I kept placing my own bets that it would pay off. But, starting with the pilot, the drama makes a bad gamble: it takes for granted that we’ll care about the fates of its shutoff, curmudgeonly power brokers, yet never gives us much reason to do so. Like so many love letters, it’s hard to decipher if you haven’t already made the leap.

I take no pleasure as I type these words. To the contrary, I feel the ghastly critical chill of admitting that I was bored by such obvious prestige television, created by people whose work I admire. Milch was behind “NYPD Blue” and “Deadwood”; as a risk-taker in a world of easy bets, he’s venerated for good reason. The series gleams with HBO handsomeness. It stars Dustin Hoffman and Nick Nolte (and Dennis Farina and Joan Allen: the cast is so impressive that I giggled when Alan Rosenberg showed up). And yet I couldn’t help feeling that I was missing something.

Much of the problem is the macho ensemble, which barks insults like comics at a roast. There’s the muttering codger Walter Smith (Nolte), the irascible trainer Turo Escalante (John Ortiz), and the stuttering rageaholic jockey-agent Joey Rathburn (Richard Kind). Then there’s Dustin Hoffman’s Chester (Ace) Bernstein, an ex-con financier who spends the bulk of his time seething in lavish hotel suites, rattling ice in a glass. Like Emily Thorne on “Revenge,” Bernstein is working a long scam against the men who wrecked his life, a scheme that we learn about through Socratic dialogues with his chauffeur-consigliere, Gus Demitriou (Farina). Visually, the show frames Bernstein as a weighty cable antihero: the Tony, the Walter, the Don. But he never evolves into more than a constipated rich guy who communicates in pained glances, curt demands, and other signifiers of manliness. In one negotiation, Bernstein name-checks Miles Davis in order to telegraph his worth to another man. In another, Bernstein’s decadent antagonist (British accent, check; flowery Biblical references, check) offers him anal sex with his stable of slave girls. When Bernstein declines, the scene seems intended to suggest that he’s a restrained romantic—a low standard, even for an antihero. (Let’s simply skirt the subject of the other female characters, who are angelic and/or dull, except for the cable-nudity contribution of two pissed-off cougars.)

Milch is famous for his aggressively stylized, arcane dialogue, and the scripts overflow with faintly “Guys and Dolls”-ish exchanges, which lean heavily on constructions like “How long my time in Siberia?” and “No icing error, this.” That oddness can be effective. But, just as often, it feels affected or expositional—once you slash through the verbal kudzu, there’s surprisingly little subtext. Some performances do kick in (especially the charismatic, roosterish Ortiz, and Kerry Condon, who makes the most of her thinly written Irish jockey), but the show’s air of menace eventually fizzles, despite propulsive synth chords insisting that trouble is on the way.

Milch has more success with the show’s quartet of lovable “railbirds”: the cranky cripple, Marcus (Kevin Dunn); the cocky Lonnie (Ian Hart); the goofy Renzo (Ritchie Coster); and the handsome Jerry (Jason Gedrick), who is hooked on gambling in a way that the show at once glamorizes and finds sickening. While their camaraderie isn’t always as funny as it’s meant to be, it’s a relief to root for these bickering small-timers, who share an innocent fantasy of the big time. In the first episode—although this is a spoiler, and I’m making this aside as lengthy as possible, in order to warn anyone who doesn’t want to know anything about the plot, it’s the basic premise of the show—the four win a jackpot. They join forces, aiming to step into the winner’s circle among the track’s storied owners, a place they’ve ogled from afar.

But the sweetest moments feature horses, not humans. At one point, a trainer gives a new owner a carrot, advising him, “Keep your hands open.” A gorgeous closeup of the horse follows, with its huge liquid alien eyes. Mann films the races with affection, capturing the stalls from above, then diving right onto the track, where we see the jockeys play aggressive games with one another, and then back out to the audience, whose faces crack open with fear and excitement. In the most thrilling of these sequences, the camera captures the ripple of flesh and the flaring red nostril of a horse in motion. The jockey is ecstatic, bonded with her steed. The owner’s eyes tear up. As classical music plays, we enter slow motion, the lens alighting on face after face. There’s a cut to a stack of money knocked against a table with an exaggerated sound effect, like a jail door banged shut. The scene is so portentous, so monumental, that I nearly switched sides—the sheer boldness was seductive. But then yet another scene featured a long, mumbling monologue to a horse. I wanted to take it seriously, but all I could think was: Mister Ed.

Like “Luck,” “Downton Abbey” arrives wrapped in the shiny foil of cachet TV (PBS, WWI, tea and corsets!). But the British series, about the aristocratic Crawley family and their titular home, goes down so easily that it’s a bit like scarfing handfuls of caramel corn while swigging champagne. To let us know that we’re safely in the Masterpiece zone, Laura Linney, clad in a black cocktail dress, introduces each episode with a tense grin, as if welcoming us to a PBS fund-raiser, which I suppose she is.

I could pick at small elements of the show, especially the extraordinary obstacles placed in the way of about fifteen separate couples. (There’s enough unrequited love to make “The Remains of the Day” look like “Caligula.”) A few villains have hearts as black as coal; a few of the decent people could use a good noogie. A threat of blackmail is overheard through a heating duct. And, despite the show’s reasonably nuanced examination of social class, there’s a suspicious ping of nostalgia that one detects over time. But I can’t lie: when I reached the final DVD in my preview package and realized that it was missing the Christmas finale, I let out an animal howl. With its perfectly crafted zingers, waves of pure heartbreak, and a visual thread count so dense it may actually qualify as a controlled substance, “Downton Abbey” is situated precisely on the Venn diagram where “prestige” meets “guilty pleasure”: it’s as much cake as it is bread. And, sue me, I like cake.

The first season began with the Titanic disaster; the second plunges us into the trenches of the First World War, emphasizing the ways in which battle causes class distinctions to at once dissolve and become more starkly apparent. As veterans return from the front, Downton becomes an auxiliary hospital, an event that confronts its wealthier inhabitants with the uselessness of their lives. (Well, most of them; Maggie Smith’s fabulously haughty dowager isn’t having any mournful breakthroughs.) The season begins slowly, but with each episode the pace intensifies; and just when you feel that you can’t take another dignified refusal there’s a resonant insight. “ ‘Flattered’ is a word posh people use when they’re getting ready to say ‘no,’ “ one suitor in a cross-class flirtation says.

While I loved plenty of the “downstairs” plots (particularly a dark turn involving the innocent chambermaid Daisy), the meatiest bits feature the three wealthy Crawley daughters, reared like veal, though sharp as vipers. (O.K., not Sybil, the youngest; she’s a sweetie.) I’ve always adored Edith, a homely gossip, who has a few oddball adventures, but my favorite is Mary, who began the show as a cold snob, then unfolded like a fan as she fell in love and faced ruin, without ever altering her essential nature. Everyone in the series has an opinion about Mary: one character mocks her as “the cold and careful Mary Crawley”; another disdains her as “an uppity minx who is the author of her own misfortunes.” For me, the sight of Mary’s beautiful white mask of a face as she drifts into an alliance with a newspaperman with shades of Rupert Murdoch inspires both pity and fascination. And the fate of Matthew, the middle-class heir to Downton, has the sweep of the best melodrama—helped along by the elegant performance of Dan Stevens. There’s no denying the show has aspirational fantasy as its hook: I’ve even heard the Crawleys compared to the Kardashians. But I prefer to think of “Downton” as an experimental take on “Fiddler on the Roof.” Just think of the Earl of Grantham as Tevye, with his three rebel daughters, plus a much better roof. L’chaim, m’lord. ♦